Level Five (26 page)

              As she unwrapped the sandwich he pulled his folding chair into the room and sat in his usual place, just out of her reach but close enough that he could explode off the chair to beat her senseless if he so desired.

             
It was impossible to gauge his mood.  His features remained passive as she ate the meal.  When she was finished, remembering the lesson she’d already learned she carefully folded the sandwich wrapper, flattened the French fry bag and the bag that had carried the food.

             
“I knew you were the one who would understand,” he said. A smile of satisfaction curved the corners of his mouth.

             
She pushed the folded papers toward him.  “There’s no point in wasting perfectly good paper.”

             
“Exactly.”  He leaned back in the chair and continued to gaze at her thoughtfully. 

             
He looked perfectly at ease and relaxed but Edie knew his posture might be deceiving.  She hadn’t seen coming the slaps he’d delivered to her face on the first night. And the night before, she’d had no clue to prepare her for his kicking fit.

             
She held his gaze, her heart thumping wildly, shooting flight or fight adrenaline through her. Unfortunately the self-survival adrenaline was wasted.  She could neither fight nor flight from this place. 

             
Doomed.  She was doomed to die here as she knew others had before her. A wild sense of hopelessness clawed up inside her, attempting to get free. She willed it away, remembering all the things she’d learned from Colette.  She couldn’t give up, not until she drew her very last breath on this earth.

             
“All I ever wanted was to be seen, to be heard.”  His voice was deceptively soft. 

             
“By your mother,” Edie said, wanting him to separate her from the mother he hated.  “Where was your father?”

             
“Dead.  He died when I was two and left me with her, a woman who shouldn’t have been allowed to raise a dog.”  He sat up, tension riding his broad shoulders.  “By the time I was old enough to go to school the only hot meal I got was in the school cafeteria.  She couldn’t get to the oven. It was piled with her crap.”

             
“That must have been very difficult for you.”

             
She knew she’d made a mistake as he rose from the chair, his face red with rage and his hands fisted into balls.  “Don’t be condescending, you stupid bitch.  Difficult?  It was agony.”

             
His fist connected with the side of her head, shooting stars in her vision.  She scuttled backward from him, but he followed, screaming at her as he punched and kicked and beat her. 

             
Pain.  Excruciating pain.  It became her thoughts, her entire world.  She couldn’t escape it and she didn’t know how to make it stop.

             
This was how the others had died, in an unbridled fit of his rage.  As he slammed his fist into her head once again she realized if she didn’t do something, say something, then she would suffer the fate of those who’d come before her.

             
She found her voice, screaming his name over and over again.  Finally he paused, his breathing labored, his shirt splattered with her blood. 

             
“What do you want from me?” she asked.  “Just tell me what you need from me.”

             
He cocked his head and stared at her, as if she was something alien he’d found in his yard, as if nobody else in his entire life had asked him what he needed.

             
His face was still red and his breaths mirrored her own ragged gasps of air.  Edie had no idea if the immediate danger had passed.  She swiped her lower lip. The back of her hand came away bloody.    

             
“I need you to hear me.”  He said the words slowly, as if speaking to somebody mentally challenged.  “I need you to know that I’m the victim, that I’ve been a victim since the moment I was born.” His fists shook at his sides and she knew if she didn’t do something, if she didn’t say exactly the right thing, he was going to explode again.

             
“Then let me tell your story,” she said desperately. “Let me write your story.  It’s what I do.  I write books about victims.”  She talked fast, ignoring the pain that racked through her entire body.  “I can get it published and then everyone will know that your mother was a monster and that you were her victim.”

             
He seemed to stop breathing for a moment as he continued to stare at her.  His hands unfurled and he took a step backward. To her surprise he whirled on his heels and left the room, not taking his chair or the paper she’d neatly folded with him.

             
He slammed the door and locked it and Edie had no idea if he’d be back in again or not.  A sob caught in her chest as she began to mentally catalogue her injuries.

             
Her lip was busted open and her left eye was beginning to swell shut. Her ribs ached but as she drew a deep breath she didn’t think any of them had been broken.

             
She was alive. That was all that mattered.   She had a feeling if she hadn’t been able to break through to him in his fit of rage, she might have wound up dead, beaten to death by the fists that had pummeled her.

             
She dragged herself into the bathroom where she sluiced her face with water.  It ran down the drain, pink from her blood.   There was no mirror to assess the damage, but she didn’t need a reflection of herself to know she was a mess.

             
But she was alive.

             
And hopefully, he’d bite on the offer that she write his story.  Not only would it buy her more time, it might also shift the power between them just a little bit.  And she needed to gain a little power before he wound up killing her.

             
It was after midnight and Jake and Teddy were still at the motel.  They had checked all the units except three where nobody was home. John, the manager had told them that all three of the units were long term rentals and definitely somebody lived in each of them.

             
He thought one of them was a young couple who spent most of their evenings at a bar down the street.  Another was rented by a man named Jimmy and the third was by a gang banger who went by the street name of Bruiser.

             
The two Detectives sat in the car, waiting for somebody to show up at any of the three.  Nobody else in the place had copped to seeing Edie or knowing her in any way.

             
“Are you sure she wasn’t working on a story?  Maybe Bruiser decided to turn his life around and wanted to memorialize his life on paper?” Teddy asked.

             
“She would have told me.  She always talked to me about her work,” Jake replied.

             
“If we don’t find anyone tonight, within the next twenty-four hours or so we’ll have the transcripts of her texts that came or went from her cell phone,” Teddy as if offering Jake a nugget of hope.

             
It didn’t feel like hope.  It simply felt like another twenty-four hours of agony, of not knowing whether she was dead or alive. 

             
Teddy popped the top on a can of sofa he’d bought from the vending machine just outside the office and downed the drink in several swallows.  He belched quickly into his hand.

             
“Thanks,” Jake said.

             
Teddy offered him a smile.  “I didn’t figure this was the time for a song.”

             
Jake slid lower in the seat.  “I just can’t imagine this place, what she’d be doing here, who she’d be talking to from here.  I can’t twist things around in my mind for any of this to make sense.”

             
He knew what Teddy probably thought, that Edie had another man in her life, a man she met here for afternoon or evening trysts when she wasn’t with Jake.

             
Jake didn’t want to believe it.  He didn’t want to believe that Edie had been so duplicitous, that she’d made love with Jake three nights a week and then during the other four days had run to the arms of a man who lived here, a man who lived anywhere.

             
He’d truly believed she was his as much as she could be anyone’s.  Did this explain why she hadn’t committed to him?  Was the reason why she wouldn’t marry him because she was involved with somebody else?

             
A touch of anger swelled up inside him.  Edie and her damned secrets.  Was she alive and well and had just taken off with some Jimmy or Bruiser after Jake had told her he needed to take some time away to think? Had she not trusted in his love enough to give him a few days?

             
“Looks like Bruiser has arrived home and he’s alone,” Teddy said.

             
Jake looked out the passenger window to see a big, burly man in a leather vest and jeans headed for unit two. Both Teddy and Jake exited the car. 

             
“Yo, Bruiser.  We need to talk to you,” Teddy called out.

             
Bruiser took one look at the two of them and took off running.  “Shit,” Teddy exclaimed as he and Jake gave chase.

             
Bruiser was built for fighting, not for running. It was obvious in the erratic way he zigged and zagged that he was probably under the influence of something.  More than that, Bruiser was obviously one dumb son-of-a-bitch. He raced into the alley next to the motel, an alley that ended with a high concrete wall at the back and several trash dumpsters on either side. 

He was attempting to crawl into one of the dumpsters when Jake caught up with him and grabbed him by one of his biker boots.  Bruiser tried to kick him with his other foot, but Jake dodged the flailing leg. 

              “Hey, Bruiser,” Teddy said from the mouth of the alley.  Teddy was breathing hard, unaccustomed to having to run for anything but dinner.  He held his gun in his hand.  “Make it easy on yourself.  Get down and talk to us like a man or I’m going to shoot you in the leg and make you cry like a baby.”

             
Bruiser paused and Jake let go on his foot.  “Why are you guys hassling me?” He jumped down to the ground, where Jake quickly frisked him and removed a wicked looking knife from his pocket.  “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

             
“Then why did you run?” Jake asked.

             
“Automatic reflex,” Bruiser replied.  “I see cops and I figure bad things are gonna happen.”

             
Teddy gestured him forward.  “Nothing bad is going to happen here unless you make it happen.”

             
Jake followed behind the man as he headed toward Teddy.  Bruiser had shoulders the size of mountains.  Is that what Edie liked?  Was she secretly into bad boys with little brains and lots of brawn?  Men who lived in squalor and smelled like danger?

             
When Bruiser reached Teddy he eyed the two Detectives with belligerence.  “I told you I haven’t done nothing wrong.”

             
“I’m betting if I check that dumpster I’ll find a bag of weed or maybe a little crack,” Jake replied coolly.  “Now you can either answer some questions for us or I’ll go check out that dumpster.”

             
Bruiser’s gaze slid to the dumpster and then back to Jake.  “What kind of questions?”

             
“Why don’t we go to your unit for this?” Jake suggested.  He wanted to make sure Edie wasn’t someplace inside.

             
Bruiser hesitated a moment and then shrugged.  “Whatever, but I got to warn you it’s not exactly The Ritz.”

             
The three of them walked to Bruiser’s unit where he unlocked the door and opened it.  It took only one glance inside to let Jake know Edie wasn’t there. Jake didn’t want to go into the stinky, trash-filled place.

             
“We can ask our questions out here,” he said as he pulled his wallet from his pocket.  He took out his photo of Edie and handed it to Bruiser.  “Have you seen this woman?”

             
Bruiser angled the picture so that the light from inside the unit shone on it.  He slid surreptitious glances at both Jake and Teddy.  “What’s she done?”

             
Jake’s stomach twisted painfully.  “You know her?”

             
“I don’t know her personally.  Like I don’t know her name or nothing like that.”  Bruiser handed the photo back to Jake.  “But, I’ve seen her around here.  She visits Jimmy a lot.”

             
Jimmy. Jake’s head thundered with the name.